© Cambridge Collection of Aerial Photography
PERSPECTIVES
Stille Nacht Stamford POW Camp 106 Al Tutt happened across letters written by a German POW, which led him to unearth the history of the Stamford POW camp
“In the wooden huts of the Allied POW camps a great debate began, the debate of the disillusioned and the defeated. They were tortured by a sense of sin and guilt. Many were unable to still the nagging question: how had it come to pass that with enthusiasm and self-surrender young men had turned into unthinking instruments of force, into slaves to a perverted notion of loyalty and honour…”
W
hen walking past the Danish Invader, as the sun dips behind the Jelson housing, one hears the clink of glasses and laughter of patrons, and it is difficult to envisage the WWII prisoner-of-war camp that stood on this site. A compound of huts and wire, of latrines and routines and, one eye-witness says, a watchtower, manned to ensure all is in order and stays so. Hard to conjure up the faces of the Italians incarcerated in the early period of the war, especially after the North Africa campaign, only to be released and repatriated after the surrender of Italy to the Allies in September 1943. Faces to be replaced by those of captured Germans, as well as Austrians, Romanians, Hungarians and the multitude of other Europeans who found themselves fighting and
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losing on the ‘wrong’ side. Little is known about Stamford POW camp number 106, then isolated in countryside out on Empingham Road, now engulfed by the Scottish estate. It is listed by English Heritage as a ‘standard’ type and thus would have consisted of guards’ compound, prisoners’ compound, garden plots, recreation ground and sewage disposal works. Also, attached to it, was a subsidiary camp at Collyweston and there is a list of the German POWs in there; a litany of trapped souls, their names consigned to the dust of history; Ernst Krockenberger, Walter V Meegdenburg, Adolf Schoenhofen … Some illumination on the Italian period has been provided by Joe Perduno, whose father was a Stamford camp inmate. Indeed, a number of Italians remained in the area
after the conflict ended, to raise families, contribute and integrate. Less is known of the German contingent within our midst. Those several hundred doughty (ex) soldiers of the Wehrmacht who fought in fronts from Europe to Africa, the Balkans to the Eastern front, who would have been traumatised by capture and surrender; undergone the process of transit and interrogation; become accustomed to the banalities of camp life and the mundanity of physical work in the fields of Lincolnshire. In six letters, written by Max Reinhold, camp number D392662, to his parents back home in occupied Germany, there is a tantalising glimpse of life in Stamford camp. They were penned as late as 1947; it took considerable time and effort, not to mention the process of de-Nazification, to repatriate the
STAMFORD LIVING JUNE 2012
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